Dr. Bronner's All-One! All-One! All-One!

I've been familiar with the Dr. Bronner's brand of soaps since at least the 1990s. They sell plant-based liquid and bar soaps. The labels were quite odd back then. As the Wikipedia page on the company's founder, Emanuel Bronner described them:

The product labels are crowded with statements of Bronner's philosophy, which he called "All-One-God-Faith" and the "Moral ABC", both of which he included on the label of every soap bottle he produced. Many of Bronner's references came from Jewish and Christian sources, such as the Shema and the Beatitudes; others from writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Paine. On his labels, he referred to the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder as "Rabbi Hillel" and to Jesus Christ as "Rabbi Jesus." The labels became famous for their idiosyncratic style, including hyphens to join long strings of words and the liberal use of exclamation marks.

It was the kind of stuff that would make me raise an eyebrow or pucker my forehead. The text was small and cramped, reminiscent of those long horoscopes you could get, rolled up into a small cyclinder, sold in coin-operated vending machines at the front of grocery stores in the early 1980s.
But the soap was good; I still buy it once in a while. The bar soap labels are much toned down nowadays.

I didn't realize until now though, how much the company supports good causes. Ok, some things on this first page still make me raise an eyebrow, but overall, it and others on their blog quite impress me:

Pride, Joy, and Solidarity: Celebrating & Protecting LGBTQ+ Culture and Rights with our New Pride Soap Label and Support of the ACLU Foundation (June 2026)

Dueling Visions for 2030 in the Holy Land: More Violent Apartheid or a Secure Peace (Feb. 2026)

The Power of Menstrual Health Access: A Success Story from Ghana (May 2025)

Dr. Bronner’s Honors Trans Day of Visibility & Highlights Inspiring Trans Organizations (March 2025)

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Interesting. I had that same recognition of the font and art style on the bottles with those old horoscope rolls. I wonder if the similarity was intentional.

The new CEO also "capped the company’s top salary at five times that of the lowest-paid warehouse worker". That's good stuff.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/05/dr-bronners-magic-soap-david-bronner-gmo-hemp/

The original Dr. Bronner was also a little bit crazy. I remember a video segment where someone was interviewing a woman. I don't remember her relationship to him, but Dr. Bronner himself was in the background behind her, holding conversations/rants with empty air. I'm sure it must be a rough life, being committed and subjected to electroshock. :( I was never in an institution (despite a period when I should have been).

Edited Date: 2026-08-30 08:31 pm (UTC)

I wonder which came first, the soap or the horoscope rolls? My memory of the latter may be a little off. I recalled each roll having horoscopes for all 12 signs. If there were individual scrolls for each sign like in the reddit photos, then it wouldn't make sense for them to be sold in the coin machines like the jaw busters and rubber balls were, since you'd need 12 machines for people to get the ones they wanted. Maybe they were sold in boxes like the one photo shows. Or maybe both kinds were sold at different times.
The similarity in font & style is probably due to trying to fit a lot of text onto a small paper.

Thanks for the link, that was a good article too. I didn't recall the company selling coconut oil too, but I have seen it on store shelves before.

> I'm sure it must be a rough life, being committed and subjected to electroshock.

I found it interesting that he "escaped" the institution and went on to lead a successful though idiosyncratic life. He blamed the electroshocks for causing him to go blind eventually. The interview might have been with Lisa Bronner, one of his grandkids. Or maybe not, since he died in 1997. She has a video discussing changes to the soap labels made over time. The video volume is very low and hard to hear; I had to use a volume booster. The video comments remind me that a certain number of people get upset over any mention of "magic".

Darkoshi